Columbus (comic)

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
This article or the following section is not adequately provided with supporting documents ( e.g. individual evidence ). Information without sufficient evidence could be removed soon. Please help Wikipedia by researching the information and including good evidence.
Lettering from a newspaper edition

Columbus is an Austrian comic strip drawn by Norbert Kienbeck and written by Ferdinand Rieder . The strips were published for the first time in 1979 in the Kronenzeitung and were later summarized in anthologies. From the early 1980s Werner Kellner took over the duties of Norbert Kienbeck.

action

The title of the comic series refers to a raven named Columbus. At first he spent his time talking to the weathercock Johan, who was standing on a spire. When a magician named Alchimedes moved into the tower, he made Columbus his assistant and Johan appeared in fewer and fewer stories from then on. There were also recurring characters such as Harald the rabbit, Igor the hedgehog, Columbus' friend Wilma Taube and his cousin Elster, but due to the development of Alchimedes (Alchi for short) to the main character of the series, these soon disappeared from the scene again, although Columbus is the name of the comic was retained.

main characters

  • Columbus: He was not given a specific place of residence; At first he just sat on the weathercock Johan and talked to him about the benefits of bird life. But when Alchi moved into the tower, Columbus became his assistant (since no one would miss him as a bachelor due to a failed experiment). Over time, Columbus went from being a hero to a henchman, but still appeared regularly on the Strips.
  • Alchimedes: Alchi is a descendant of Archimedes and was initially dedicated to science. The secret of his popularity lay in his versatility as he worked in different professions. For example, he was a magician, innkeeper, researcher and policeman. He performed all of these tasks with highly questionable methods that often made readers wonder whether he was really as intelligent as he claimed to be.

Special

At the beginning the stories only took place around the tower or the surrounding area. Soon, however, the environment expanded to travel around the world, through time and even through space. Although the inventors rarely referred to current topics in their stories, it could happen that not only recent events were used in some strips, but that people who were still alive appeared in them. There were also guest appearances by historical, biblical and pop-cultural celebrities, including David Livingstone , Cain and Abel and the Kasperl . The Austrian TV commissioner Kottan also made an appearance. Each individual strip (which usually consisted of four images) was mostly self-contained, but it could also happen that a plot spanned several strips. Here, plot elements from books or films were also used, such as Dracula , Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom , Mutiny on the Bounty , The Name of the Rose or The Czar's Courier .

humor

Almost any kind of humor is used in the strips, such as proverbs, puns (for example, a loaf of anchor loaf prevents a raft from crashing into a rock), or even the appearance that the characters knew they were only in a comic book occurred. In doing so, they consciously tried not to be funny, but this was nullified by slight hints such as a bread joke. Also, some jokes could be understood a bit brutally, as Alchi said during a time travel on a strip that a small village would one day become a metropolis full of people with beaming faces, which in the last picture could be read on the place name sign Chernobyl . In one story, a snowman also asked himself : "Is there life after winter?" After the question: "Is there life after death?"

Trivia

"Keri" signature
  • The signature "Kiri" was to be seen under every last picture of the strip; an abbreviation for the last names of the inventors Kienbeck and Rieder. Later the abbreviation "Keri" was for waiter / Rieder.
  • Some Columbus jokes were reused in the comics "Leo, the Raven" and "Daniel and Florian", which were written by the same authors and published in the Goldi newspaper of the Austrian Creditanstalt .

Web links